Your Reign of Love

The sun beats down, boiling the landscape
into a thick stew of fertile potential, while sandy
pathways wind through mesquite bushes as
saguaros and chollas scrape at the hiker's bare
legs. He dares to trudge along a ridge separating
a sere, summer, waterless gully from the lush
hillside vegetation marking off islands, pockets
of rich habitats where hares and quail scurry,
carefree. But in the gully's dry streambed, lizards flit,
here and there, slurping up insects, ants and flies
while rattlesnakes curl and shake, poised to strike
at any warm-blooded creature passing nearby.

Overhead a lonely Red-tailed hawk eagle-eyes
a ground squirrel and rapidly dives, claws clutching,
talons piercing, squeezing the life out of its prey.
The rays of the sun sap the hiker's lifeforce,
sweating it right out of his pores as he seeks
a middle ground between predatory strategies
of elitist succubae and the quicksand foundation
of the gully's waterless, streambed floor. The hiker
hears echoes of formative suppositions taught
by society's professors of conventional wisdom
in the cries of the hawk carried on the hot, dry
winds over the gully, "Predation is the natural
order of the world." But the hiker dreams
of a spineless cactus, harmless and medicinal,
spiritual and psychoactive, to calm the savage
inclinations of capitalist, territorial barking dogs
expressing their infantile demand, "Mine!" All
they want is to eat everything in sight alive!
Fear induces all living beings into stonelike
catatonia. The searing heat stains the hiker's
skin blood red, cooking his flesh, unseasoned,
for some coyote pack's dinner, sans place setting.

The hiker reaches the summit and looks down,
all around him. Only the hot blue sky blankets
him. The hiker takes off his boots and dons
a pair of mid-calf-high moccasins. He lights
a pipe which exudes a perfumy, peyote scent.
The hiker dons the head of an eagle, and claws
at the sky with sharp, white talons. Then, he spins
in circles, arms extended outward, weaving
about like an eagle on the air, soaring, chanting.
"Oh Father Sky, Brother Sun, Mother Earth and
Sister Moon, I weave the dance of rain before
your eyes, I claw at your skin that you might rain
your watery blood, the liquid of sustenance
on the world before me, and rein in the strife
of brother against brother, allow us all to revel
in the sweet nectar of Your Reign of Love."

A Grave I, Myself, Dug

I am listening to stereo with only one ear
and lookin' at three dimensions with just one eye.
I stand, facing a cold, cutting wind without a blanket,
smelling your flavors through a stuffy nose
and tasting your aroma with an icy tongue -
only good for biting out acerbic remarks -
as my snaggletooth mouth snarls a grin
which can only be read between the braille
lines drawn across the linen draperies
closing off my mind's synaptic connections.
I play guitar with fingers cut off at the first
knuckle: tipless, insensitive stubs, unexpressive
and lacking a pulse. I wade through thigh-high,
melting, snow drifts on rickety legs: nothing more
than flesh and bone, all muscle tone withered,
becoming a willow, tearlessly weeping
from inside a coffin in a grave I, myself, dug.

Polo Brunch with The Beatles

My fingers reach to her lips
and gently place a strawberry
into her anxiously awaiting
mouth. She grasps the berry
between the tips of her teeth.
I hear a giggle ripple out
from her throat as she closes
her lips over the strawberry
and grins broadly, a fire in her
eyes, juice dripping down
across her chin. I lean forward
and slurp the red stain away.

Out from the ice cooler, she
pulls a bottle of champagne
and two chilled flutes. I rip
soft slabs of fresh sourdough
from a round loaf and cut
cheddar wedges as she pours
bubbly into the glasses, leaving
room for a single strawberry
to adorn the flutes along with
a freshly snipped mint sprig.

In the warm, Pacific Palisades,
spring morning, Rita Wild spins
vinyl, remixed, Beatles' platters
upon which we serve our
brunch with The Beatles.
We snuggle close together
on the picnic blanket spread
across the lawn on a knoll
overlooking the Will Rogers
Polo Club engaging in spirited
chukkers on the turf below.

The salty air from the nearby
beach barely finds room to drift
between our goose bumps and
mesmeric gazes while our soft voices
cowl thickly around our mingling
auras. Electricity flies between
our fingertips as The Beatles
urge us to spend our innocence -
encouraging the trampling
energy the strong polo steeds
liberate across the grassy
polo field - raising our passion.

Beyond the Last, Elusive Chimera

A red haired goddess stalks my lucid dream
from a land beyond the last, elusive chimera;

her fair, honey-dipped skin - an eye-catching raceme
of lilies of the valley - opens like a spewing caldera

as she closes her eyelids, darkening blue pools
as if an eclipse blotted out clear morning rays;

a shimmering misty shower reflects jewels'
faceted starburst glitter-rain-induced daze,

and she lays claim to the fading, but still-glowing,
ember that yet hums out a zesty, soulful tune

in the wee, haunting hours of autumn, plateau rising;
leaving a mesa, color carpeted with leaves strewn

into a blanket, radiating a softly inviting bed
upon which we lay, nuzzling, cheek-to-cheek,

and I smell her ambrosial breath dance: a thread
marking the seam leading from valley to peak;

then, a skein of yarn unravels autumn's sparkling scheme
winding along a dusty, meandering path to a new Riviera.

This poem has been selected by the editors at Osprey Journal for publication in their July/August 2009 issue.

Kaleidoscopic Decorations

"If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite." - William Blake

A child points a kaleidoscope directly
at the Sun, turns the telescoping
cylinders in opposite directions
facilitating fascinating fantasies
spun on the immaculate whimsey
of unbridled, limitless innocence.

The ageless infant mind discovers
from each gentle screwing
of the kaleidoscopic wheel
a unique doorway opens,
one possibility out of infinity.

Don Juan Matus told Carlos, diligently,
"... our lives originate in infinity,
and they end up wherever
they originated: infinity."

The child wonders, deliberatively,
"Why is the world fenced
with so many restrictions
when we are born free,
without any clothes?"

Mommies and daddies, dementedly,
scramble to dash expressions
of expertise, imprinting labels
they design for garments
draping the kaleidoscope's
imagery quickly, before
the final curtain falls.

Aldous Huxley announced, derisively,
"... how I longed to be left
alone with Eternity
in a flower, Infinity
in four chair legs
and the Absolute
in the folds of a pair
of flannel trousers!"

Under a maple spreading deciduously,
limbs calmly and stately accept
a tailor's seasonal alterations,
knowing: even from tapped
reservoirs, new fountains
of freshly embroidered
needlework will splash
kaleidoscopic decorations
on woody skin's aging bark.

Her Drummer's Native Chant-Dance

Venus radiated like a glowing porch light,
her diffused brilliance swam across the pitch sky
in the moonless, pre-dawn hours, draping my gaze
with her alluring, fascination-dripped countenance.
As a warm spring wind buffeted all around me,
the haunting specter of a familiar, feminine face
filled my half-awake, heavy-lidded eyes' field of vision
with her full, pouty lips and big, dark, cavern pool eyes.

As a breath rasped between my gaping lips,
I recalled moments from my now-ancient past,
requisite recondite glimpses between flashing
flame flickers licking from a candle's lost longing.
The rhythm of my heart pounded to the beat
insisted by her drummer's native chant-dance,
furtively howling into the vast star field expanse -
a black-robed, velvet-throated sacrificial oblation.

A still silence eternally coupled us like links
in a macrocosmic chain as intimate confidantes
in a realm beyond tactile encounters, where spirits
soar on wings of fire and bloom like lilacs, alone.
She challenged me with chants from her erotic
Demiurge to weave stranded patterns of golden
light waves across the sands of time, and to unlace
the bonds of ignorance, permitting salvation's reign.

The waters of my world froze solidly and ceased
to flow years ago, after the current of our magnetic
dynamism spontaneously combusted in the fusion
of cause and effect, dispersing our electric charge.
In the pre-dawn, solipsistic hours, her silent chant
beckoned to a long-dormant, fissile facility to strew
gnosis' seeds upon fertile ground, and heedless
of benediction's constraint, I returned her gaze.

Without Boundaries

A velvet breeze flutters through
fleecy drifts of snow across a blank
horizon within an eternal lull
as I diffuse into crumb specks
staining an icy surface like a bleached
subatomic drip of dark matter.

Caution flies in the face of winds
that silently howl, weightlessly,
through the infinite night.

I'm riding the turbulent face
of one continuous, cresting wave
without a board, walking
on a pipeline tube -
a swirling, electromagnetic
curl - way out in the distance,
beyond the last buoy in the space
just past time's horizon.

Each and every memory
I ever invented or detained,
every sensation-condensed
fantasy I imagined out
from the nether underworld,
each passionate instant
I grasped and tasted, every
gleaming breath I gulped
erupts in 3-D across
eternity's unedited and
uncensored theater screen.

Entranced, I watch my reels
intermingle with the incomprehensible
universal totality, spontaneously
splicing together in sporadic fits
of unexpected discrimination.

I melt into the walls of certainty
from the bottom of a waterless
ocean and it feels almost like I
am drowning; or being sucked
up by a giant vacuum cleaner.

Until, in a sudden flash,
an explosion of every color,
every taste, every smell,
every emotion, the gamut
of all sounds and melodies,
and every sensation,
from the most intense
pain to the greatest ecstasy,
washes over my mind and
I lose all sense of myself,
of any self, of anything
at all, and the consuming
awareness of everything-
become-one, without boundaries,
but just the sheer weight
of totality, Allness floods
into me as I seep into it.

In the unifying moment,
the complete understanding
and harmony in the cohesive
integrity of coalescence
makes perfect sense.